715 – Tips to increase revenue: Tom talks Ten Email Marketing Tips

Episode 715 – Ten Email Marketing Tips
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 715 as Screw the Commute Podcast. Today, I'm going to give you ten email marketing tips, folks. Email is where the money is. The better you get at it, the more money you're going to make. All right. Get to that in a minute. Hope you didn't miss Episode 714. That was the Tor browser. If you ever want to get high security and hide your browsing activity, this is an episode for you. Episode 714 About the Tor browser. As always, the way you get to a back episode is you go to screwthecommute.com, slash and then the episode number. That was 714. All right, make sure you follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and also pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and you will thank me for it if you do even a portion of what's in this book. How do you think I crank out 715 episodes of a podcast plus all the other stuff and run a mentor program and do all the stuff that I do? Well, it's because I'm not fighting with my computer all the time. And this book will show you the ways to automate a lot of things for yourself. All right, so pick that up at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Also pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app.

[00:01:49] All right. Let's get to the ten email marketing tips. All right. First thing is make sure you segment your list. Only send things to people that have shown interest. For instance, I have brutal self defense. I have protection, dogs leak, I have fatso tennis, I have great internet marketing training. I got public speaking stuff out the wazoo. Wake him up stuff. Well, if somebody is looking for public speaking stuff, they're not interested in protection dogs, probably maybe a tiny fraction of a percent. But if I sent protection dog stuff to people that were looking for public speaking training, well, they would unsubscribe. They'd say, This is crap. I wasn't I didn't sign up for dog stuff, you know? So segment your list. That's the first tip. And I don't know, I think there's ten or 11 here. Next thing is HTML. Email is now OC, but with caveats. Now, those of you that have known me for a long time, I railed against HTML email for many, many years for many, many legitimate reasons. And I mean everybody making lots of money.

[00:02:58] We just use them plain text. Well, that changed several years ago, however, you know, so HTML is good, but the next tip is to avoid graphics. Don't try to put pictures and all kinds of stuff in it because a lot of people use a preview viewer and all the pictures and all the fanciness that you created in your HTML is deleted in the pre viewer and your email looks worse than if it was just text. All right. So don't do that. All right. Subject line, here's another tip for you. And guess what? If you mess this up, whatever you do, pass, this does not matter. You could have the best product on earth ever, the best sales letter. But if they never open the email, you're dead in the water. So this is critically important. Make it 50 characters or less, including spaces. Don't put their name in it anymore. You're wasting a lot of valuable space. Most important stuff in the subject line to the left and used as a garnish principle, which I've covered in other episodes on copywriting, which is create curiosity so that they can't help but go ahead and open the email. One of my biggest ever was Boy, did I get in trouble and dot, dot, dot. And people were like, Wow, I wonder what Tom did Now They had to open it.

[00:04:21] All right. So that's a critical thing. Subject lines. All right. Once you get inside, avoid graphics. Like I said, you can, but you can use bold and color and size of font for emphasis. Don't use underlining because underlining on websites or emails means you can click on it. So don't underline to emphasize things you can use all caps on know not too much, but on little subheadings and maybe emphasize a word. And that grabs attention and also used the Zagar technique to get the click through to your website see the the the trend is shorter emails leading to a web page where you can put gorgeous graphics and all kinds of interest gaining techniques that wouldn't be appropriate or or would make it look stupid in email if it didn't show up correctly. And one of my first mentors did a study and showed that like 60% of HTML emails were not showing up on the other end to the receiver like they were when you sent it. Plus, it takes a lot more time to create these fancy ones. So unless you're a professional emailer, and even though I've sent out over a billion emails, I don't consider myself a professional email. That's somebody that's a geek that sits in a big company with other geeks, and they're testing everything, every browser on earth, every cell phone to make sure that their emails look good.

[00:05:49] No, I don't do all that. All right. So you got to keep it simple and just use text and use all those formatting techniques of text that create the interest. All right, Now next tip. Send more emails than you are comfortable with and you watch your complaint and unsubscribe rate. See the more emails you you send. Up to a point, the more money you'll make. And you and you've got to get used to the fact people are going to unsubscribe and complain. That's just part of the deal. Now, complaints shouldn't be that much. If you've signed them up properly and you're giving them what you promised them and you're not sending them things that aren't of interest to them. So that shouldn't be that that big a deal and unsubscribe is great. They left and they're not complaining to anybody. They're just getting off your list. And the more of those that get off your list, the people that are on your list, you get a higher click through rate and you have a higher score with all the email things that are watching you, the servers and everybody else that makes your reputation, your email reputation better. So if they unsubscribe, great, just wave goodbye to them. Another thing, there's another tip for you. Check your balance manager frequently and eliminate hard bounces. See, there's two things a hard bounce and a soft bounce.

[00:07:11] A hard bounce means that email ain't ever going through, ever. It either doesn't exist or I don't know what other reasons there could be, but but it ain't going through. So one thing I do before I delete the hard bounces is I check to see if there's some obvious mistake in them like a dot SEO. Now there is such a thing as a dot SEO, but mostly it's the dot com and somebody has somehow got in there without a dot com on it or some other thing that I might recognise the person and I know they, they like me, they buy all kinds of stuff from me, but that for in that particular email list their emails messed up so I fix it. Now soft bounces means there's some kind of glitch that it didn't get through, but what you need to do is set yourself a number where if it's bounced, soft bounce more than a certain number of times. I think for me it's 20. If it bounces more than 20 times, that's a couple of months worth of emails that I've sent out. It's not getting through to them. I delete them. And like I said, the less you have in your bounces, the better your reputation is and the higher your click through rate is. All right, next tip whenever possible, don't embed links under clickable text.

[00:08:29] Clickable text is called anchor text. That's the actual term for it. See if some people print out the email and give it to somebody else. Nobody can see where the link actually went. Also, it's scary a little bit because usually if you hold your mouse over a clickable link, you can see where it actually goes. And if it's some humongous crazy looking link that scares people and they're a little bit afraid to click, that's not everybody, but it's very common. So make it easy to read, remember and say. We use a thing called pretty Link so that we can take a humongous look and weird link tracking link or affiliate link and make it very simple. Like, for instance, I'm promoting this summit that I'm on now and I got this enormous link. Well, I just put screwthecomnmute.com/getpublished and that redirects through pretty links. And I can say that on this. See how easy it was for me to say that on this podcast? I have no idea what the original link is. I can't remember it. Some weird af equals something. A bunch of numbers. I don't know. So use you, get yourself pretty links. It's a plug in for WordPress. I don't know if it'll work for anything else, but we use it all the time and that helps get much more clicks.

[00:09:55] All right. Next tip. Use pieces. He says even in in physical letters are highly read part of an email so use pieces is I usually bold p dot dot and that makes them stand out a little bit more. And then I made a mistake one time when I have more than one piece, I put pieces like size instead of piece, right? So that can be something extra. There's loads of things. There's people online and I think I did it in my email master class or Mastermind to tell you all the kinds of things you can do with a piece that help your email marketing. So use pieces and put links in more than once. So in case one of them gets a glitch or something, it's the same link, but you've had it in the email twice and I don't always do this, but whenever I'm possible I put one clear at the bottom and then one put, put one midway in the email when to try to get them to click. So there's a bunch of tips. If you did even a portion of those, you're probably going to increase your income from email marketing. And like I said, that's where the money is. And the only people that dispute this are the people that sell social media training. But here's the thing. Social media, you may have heard me say this many times, I got to hammer it in your head is a necessary evil because people will check you out on social media, but your job is to get them the heck off of the social media through the many methods that I teach with, you know, sales of products and giveaways and freebies and contests and all kinds of stuff to get them on your email list that you control because email folks is undisputable.

[00:11:50] That's where the money is. All right. If you like to really get dig into this, I have a I run an email mastermind a couple of times a year. However, I'm happy to sell you the the recordings and all the things and you still get to ask questions for me personally and everything. It's screwthecommute.com/emailmastermind and it's it was a six week course but you can accelerate it and now but you do what these recordings have to see other people and you know you can learn a lot from other people that are doing this with the questions that they came up with during the the sessions. So check it out at screwthecommute.com/emailmastermind and send those emails. Folks, I want to see you making money. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.